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Full-Text Articles in Law
A Race Or A Nation? Cherokee National Identity And The Status Of Freedmen's Descendents, S. Alan Ray
A Race Or A Nation? Cherokee National Identity And The Status Of Freedmen's Descendents, S. Alan Ray
ExpressO
The Cherokee Nation today faces the challenge of determining its citizenship criteria in the context of race. The article focuses on the Cherokee Freedmen. As former slaves of Cherokee citizens, the Freedmen were adopted into the Cherokee Nation after the Civil War pursuant to a treaty with the United States, and given unqualified rights of citizenship. The incorporation of the Freedmen into the tribe was resisted from the start, and now, faced with a decision of the Cherokee Nation’s highest court affirming the descendents’ citizenship rights, the Nation prepares to vote on a constitutional amendment which would impose an Indian …
The Pocahontas Exception: American Indians And Exceptionalism In Virginia’S Racial Integrity Act Of 1924, Kevin Noble Maillard
The Pocahontas Exception: American Indians And Exceptionalism In Virginia’S Racial Integrity Act Of 1924, Kevin Noble Maillard
ExpressO
Most scholarship on Loving v. Virginia (1967) briefly mentions the “Pocahontas Exception,” a subsection of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 which counted persons of limited American Indian ancestry as white. However, few of these works raise the issue outside of a footnote. This article addresses the treatment of Native American ancestry as a curious exception to the threat of racial impurity. Virginia’s antimiscegenation statute sought to eradicate stealth intrusions of tainted blood into the white race, which proponents believed to be threatened “by the quagmire of mongrelization.” Exempted from this racial policing regime were those influential whites, the “First …